


periastron

by saltrose



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Alcohol Mentions, Grim Reapers, Implied/Referenced Character Death, M/M, Some angst, bye idk how or what to tag, johnil, platonic tenil + do..tae? doil? dotael + doten
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-07
Updated: 2017-01-08
Packaged: 2018-09-15 14:07:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,020
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9238325
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saltrose/pseuds/saltrose
Summary: Everyone is born with a soul, it’s just that some people have more of it than others.Taeil, unfortunately, turned out to be part of the latter.





	1. Chapter 1

Everyone is born with a soul, it’s just that some people have more of it than others.

Taeil, unfortunately, turned out to be part of the latter.

He distinctly remembered when he learned of this fact, punctuated by a loud, “oh for fuck’s sake, not again,” from a red-haired man leaning over him. Taeil didn't remember what had put him on the wet grass, but he was grateful when the man sighed and offered a hand to help him up.

"So. I guess I should start out with the fact that you're kind of dead," said the redhead, his voice rising at the end as if he wasn't sure of it himself. He was taller than Taeil, with eyes that seemed to pierce straight through you if he focused his attention on you. Taeil stepped back and looked down at his body, trying to place the feeling that seemed to take up every inch of it. It was as if he was filled with an emptiness, which didn't make sense even to himself, but there it was. It was the vacuum created when you were stripped of something you didn't even realize you had to begin with. Taeil swallowed, opened his mouth to say something only to realize his only thought was less of a sentence and more like 20 question marks slamming into each other in the back of his throat.

"Eughhh?" As far as introductions went, he had the feeling this was one of his worsts.

"I'm Dongyoung. I was sent to collect your soul. You don't have enough. Or didn't have enough, I guess." _Sure, of course,_ Taeil thought, _Why else would I wake up on the grass with a stranger complaining I don't have enough soul._ He knew he was feeling the sort of resigned acceptance that only comes from utter confusion and disbelief, but he didn't want to examine anything in too much detail for fear he'd wind up laying on the grass again. They stood there, facing each other, playing chicken with their eye contact, the silence pressing in on them so hard Taeil swore he shrunk another few inches.

"Didn't?" he managed to croak out, his voice only barely catching in the beginning.

"Sorry?"

"You said I didn't have enough. What does that mean? Are you like a repo man for souls?" It dawned on Taeil that this was possibly an impolite question to asked a stranger, but said stranger had already admitted to him that he'd tried to collect it. Probably without Taeil's permission. He was a little fuzzy on details but he was fairly sure he hadn't rendered up his soul. Although it could have been included in some terms and conditions he had signed, but Taeil was going to take a chance that it wasn't.

"REPO MAN? A- a repo man? Wow, humans these days. No. I'm a reaper, and, well, you are too now." Dongyoung at least had the grace to look slightly abashed at that. "See," he held up a card, "you died, and you were on my case list, so I was just doing my job and collecting your soul. It's not my fault you didn't have enough, and now we're both stuck here having this conversation."

"So what, I'm in some sort of soul debt, and I pay it off by working as a grim reaper?" The more Taeil thought about this, the more convinced he became that he had fallen asleep and this was all some weird fever dream.

Dongyoung looked down at his shoes, kicking at the grass until clumps of soil flew between their legs. "Uh. Not quite..."

In hindsight, Dongyoung had done a pretty decent job in explaining what he could despite not truly knowing how the system actually worked. Part divine afterlife, part mid level management, part fate having a good old laugh at their expense, the reaper life was not exactly what the media had made it out to be. There was definitely some higher level power, a boss who handed out assignments of souls to be collected, but no reaper had ever seen or contacted them. Each reaper had bank accounts, salaries, quarterly goals, performances reviews, and employee outings where all the local reapers would get together and drink until they forgot what they did every day of their endless lives. Dongyoung explained that everyone who didn't have enough soul became reapers, some curse that left them sucking out the souls of others with a single touch. Immortality with a bonus signing of a job sending people into the afterlife, just to taunt you that you can't go yourself.

He went over different theories, one where scientifically, those with less soul just naturally sucked out the souls of those they touched "like atoms stealing the electrons of other atoms except all the electrons get sent to some soul bank or some shit like that." Two, that it was truly a curse, and reapers waited until they met someone with too much soul and were finally able to rest in peace, which Dongyoung declared as "total bullshit if you ask me. I've been doing this over 300 years, and I've never heard of a reaper collecting someone with too much soul, people just want to believe in something." Dongyoung's personal theory was that everyone was fucked and stuck in this existence by some cruel roll of fate's dice and nothing would change either way.

"So. Yeah. That's it I guess. Come with me, I'll get you set up with the system, and a new place to stay. Oh, one more thing. You technically don't exist anymore. Your family and friends don't remember you, there aren't records of you in any job or on a lease or anything."

"Oh." There was really nothing else Taeil could say, since if he said anything else, he would probably end up screaming until his throat was raw.

"Yeah. I'm meeting with someone for drinks at 10. You'll need some too."

And that was how Taeil became a reaper.

\---

The first reaping didn't go so well. Dongyoung had explained to him that just touching a human with his bare hand would do the trick and then handed him a pair of gloves "to avoid any accidents and a shit ton of paperwork," he said. When Taeil received the first assignment, the words printed neatly on a thick cardstock, he'd panicked and refused to touch the human who had appeared at the location listed. What Dongyoung had conveniently forgotten to explain was what happened when a soul wasn't collected in time. Taeil had made Dongyoung pay for all of his food and drinks that night.

After that, it got easier for Taeil.

It wasn't pleasant when he thought about the moral aspects of his job, but the routine of it eased the guilt he felt inside. Taeil stopped trying to imagine their backstory, what happened to the individuals to lead them to this point, whether there was an afterlife and if so, where those souls were destined to go. One touch, just a graze of his skin, some paperwork, and that was it. He repeated to himself that he was a part of the process, and while he was a reaper, he was not the cause of their deaths. Some days when he looked into the mirror, he believed it more than others.

It was his tenth reaping where it went wrong.

The card told him to be at the subway station one cold night at 1:49 AM. His assignment would wear a puffy gray parka, navy sweatpants, and sneakers. Taeil spotted the name. Dark hair, around the same height as him, but he moved constantly through the crisp air on the empty platform, limbs constantly flowing as he moved to music unheard.

Taeil took off his gloves and went to tap him on the shoulder. The other man swung around to face him, startled by Taeil's presence, before pulling out ear buds from one side.

"Uh, hi. Do you know when the train is coming? The marquis is broken." A boring opener, but he was exactly out to win Reaper of the Year or anything.

The man relaxed and pulled out his phone from his pocket to check the time.

Taeil reached forward to bring his fingers over the man's hand.

It felt horrible. Like two magnets with the the same pole facing each other, both repelling away from the other. Taeil gritted his teeth and pushed harder, desperate to get this over with so he could get home and continue watching the show about cooking he had paused before hopefully falling asleep on the couch and praying another card wouldn't be waiting for him when he awoke.

Touch.

The moment their skin met, Taeil remembered where he had felt this feeling before as the man in front of him crumpled to the cement floor. Taeil crouched down beside him, unsure how long it would take before the man came to or what he should say when he did. It needs to be better than what I heard. _"Congratulations, you're immortal?" "Hello, I'm your fairy god reaper?"_ Neither particularly appealed to him, and he took a wild guess they wouldn't go over so well with the man in front of him either. He wracked his brain, trying to come up with the perfect phrase, feeling time slipping away from him. The subway train pulled up to the station, opened it's doors for a passenger fate had detoured somewhere else, and began to pull away from the platform.

The man's eyes opened. Taeil was out of time.

"On the bright side, we cover all transportation fees." _Wow. Way to go. What a great start to this conversation._

"Huh?" said the man.

"I-. I'm sorry, I've never done this before, and I only got turned a month ago, and Dongyoung said this was really infrequent, and it would probably be decades before this happened because he's been doing this over 300 years and he's only turned 5 people and-" Taeil stopped, swallowed nervously and licked his lips. Unfortunately, it didn't help at all, so he tried repeating the steps. No luck. The man was staring at him while trying to surreptitiously searching the ground by him for his phone.

"You see, you're dead. Ish. You're a reaper? Like me? And we're immortal but also our lives as humans have been stripped from existence, so... So. Yeah." This was going so much worse than Taeil could have even imagined. He reached into his pocket and tugged his gloves back onto his cold hands. "Umm. I'm Taeil. Let me help you up."

With the gloves on, Taeil could handle the weird skin repulsion feeling that crept up his fingers, like he had icy sludge suddenly coursing through his veins. It still didn't feel good, and he let go as soon as the man was standing.

"I'm Chittaphon..." he said carefully, looking around the platform as if he expected a camera crew to jump out yelling 'Gotcha!' at any moment. If only.

"Chi- Chi-" he tried, trying to convince his mouth to make the sounds he'd heard only for his tongue to give up and put up a Do Not Disturb sign. He shook his head. "Can I call you something else?" He looked at the card with the description, location, and time on it with a number discreetly printed in the upper right corner. "What about Ten?"

"Okay. Sure. Now what the hell is going on?"

Taeil licked his lips nervously again, trying to remember how Dongyoung had explained it. He couldn't remember the point where he finally accepted all of it as true, so he just started rambling, trying repeat everything he remembered before giving up and reaching into his phone.

He tapped the screen a couple times before holding it up to his ear. "Dongyoung? Hey it's me. I, uh. Sort of made another reaper so if you could come meet us and help me out...Yeah. Okay. I'll see you there." He put his phone back in his pocket and began to walk toward the stairs before turning back to look at Ten.

"You coming? Dongyoung－ he's like my reaper mentor－ swears the best thing for new reapers is just to get really, really drunk. I'm paying."

Ten opened his mouth, seemed to think better of it, and shook his head before following after Taeil. He'd already missed his train and didn't exactly have anything better to do.


	2. Chapter 2

Ten had moved in with Taeil, despite being given an identical apartment. Living together eased an ache inside each of them they never spoke of, an insatiable itch for closeness with another person. Most nights they sat on the couch, watching whatever documentary or cooking show they could find, determined that even if they were technically no longer human, their bucket lists still held. Neither one had cooked much in their lives, Taeil because he simply didn't care to do so, Ten because he had a tendency to set things on fire and unknowingly serve the bits of food you'd normally toss in the trash. Ten would wrap the blanket around his legs, and as the minutes passed, sneak his toes underneath Taeil's thighs. He always claimed it was because they were cold, but it was a lie they both refused to call out.

 

They missed casual touches.

 

They missed the ease of wiping someone's hair out of their face, the accidental hip brushes as you tried to squeeze by someone, the joy in a warm hand wrapped around your own. Every move to reapers was calculated and with every touch came a soul.

 

So Taeil ignored the buzzing in his skin that repeatedly told him to move away when Ten would seek warmth for his feet. He would open his arms when Ten would crawl into the other side of the bed after a reaping and card his fingers through Ten's hair until his shuddering breaths evened out. Ten's fingers searching for reassurance and grounding were always met with Taeil's own twining around them.

 

Dongyoung had come over one Tuesday night for the latest in their culinary experimentation, swearing if he was used as a test taster for their entry of the World's Worst Dish, he'd have them doing his paperwork for the next year. When he saw Ten swat at Taeil trying to peek over his shoulder at the simmering pot on the stove, Dongyoung shuddered.

 

"How can you stand to... you know, touch?"

 

"How do you stand to just touch people when you have an assignment?" Ten asked, wiping his hands off on the apron he wore tied around him. He swore it made him a better cook, more at home in the kitchen; Taeil never brought up the two times the ruffles on it had caught fire. It worked for them.

 

"You two are like each other's Chicken Soup for the Reaper Soul or something. Minus the souls part. Also, no offense but the chicken soup part is probably inedible."

 

In later retellings, Ten would swear the wooden spoon was already in his hand as he shook it at Dongyoung, the pasta sauce that landed on his cheek and shirt an accidental (yet convenient) by-product. Dongyoung maintained that Ten had marched back to the stove to grab the spoon before firing it at him in a clear attempt on his freshly-starched shirt's life. Taeil refused to get involved, telling each of them that his whole attention during the exchange was focused on dicing an onion, and ignored their demands for his witness testimony.

 

Dongyoung retaliated, stubborn as he was, and the sauce painted the floor in patches stretching from the stove to the baseboards in the living room. The two reapers yelled at each other, simultaneously trying to cover the other in whatever their hands could grab while remaining as pristine as possible. Taeil abandoned his onion, choosing to stand hidden in the corner, using the refrigerator door as a shield and peering out behind it. A laugh desperately tried to escape his lips, threatening to draw attention to him and bring him into the fight. His eyes gleamed in a way some might call misty with a chance of tears but Taeil preferred to call healthily moisturized.

 

He wasn't sure why his heart felt full yet light just watching them. Maybe it was the normalcy of the two bickering men, both swearing the other had started it.  Maybe it was the way he had forgotten his old life, even just for a moment. Maybe it was the way his stomach was secretly rejoicing that they'd have to end up ordering takeout instead of subjecting themselves to Ten's "special surprise."

 

Later, Dongyoung toweled off his hair, wet from a shower he had demanded access to immediately, and deliberately ignored Ten's assertions that he looked like a rabbit caught in the rain. Ten had simply taken a wet paper towel and rubbed at anything he could see on his skin, calling it good enough. The three of them plopped onto whatever surface looked reasonably free of food and polished off the pizza Taeil had ordered as Ten mourned the aftermath of his dinner attempts.

 

Just as he reached the point in his meal where he began to mentally rate pizza toppings during his mindless munching (1: would not finish the slice [ _ Carrots-- why],  _ 10: would finish the whole pie [ _ Double pepperoni. No. Triple.]),  _ they all heard the sound.

 

"I swear, the boss just purposefully waits until we're enjoying ourselves before dropping an assignment in the box," Ten said, making a valiant effort at scowling while still talking with a mouth full of food.

 

Dongyoung shook his head, swallowing his bite before chiming in, "Not me anymore. I signed up for text alerts." Taeil and Ten stared at him. "What, I'm over 300 years old and technically soulless, so I can't care about how getting paper printouts contributes to global deforestation? Unbelievable..." he muttered, biting into his pizza with a great deal more force than Taeil believed was required.

 

Taeil got up and walked towards the desk, only half-comprehending Ten's tirade about how their boss had probably bugged all their apartments before they moved in. The thick cardstock sat in a basket, conjured from thin air, the black print so dark it felt as if it began to absorb all the light in the room. Snatching the assignment out of the basket, afraid it would drag him back to whatever kind of demonic Kinko's it had come from, he carried it back to the couch.

 

A grease stain smudged along the side marred the otherwise pristine card. Taeil absently rubbed his hand along his pants as he read, Dongyoung sniffing in distaste.

 

_ #26: Man. 6'1, semi-long dark hair, medium build, early 20s. _

 

The location wasn't too far from Taeil's apartment, the park only a few blocks away. It was dated for 11:53 AM in two days. He always felt conflicted about daytime reapings. On the one hand, at least he didn't have to be the only person they saw before he collected their souls, reasoning that it gave the souls a measure of peace. Then again, the aftermath was generally unpleasant. Taeil only wanted to escape back home as quickly as possible afterwards, and it looked strange to see someone fleeing from a person moments before they died. One day he was sure he'd be called in for questioning by the police; Dongyoung had assured him that their boss would take care of it should it happen, but he and Ten weren't convinced. Ten had remarked in hushed tones that the boss would probably "get a kick out of it, probably saves on a cable bill by playing with us instead." Taeil secretly agreed, always trying to regulate his power walk away and give off I-have-somewhere-incredibly-important-to-be vibes instead of strange-man-possibly-poisons-someone-and-then-immediately-leaves. He had the sneaking suspicion it actually came off as desperately needing to pee, but he'd take it.

 

He tossed the card onto the table, reaching for his pizza again and taking a bite. His stomach lurched, roiling like an angry sea. Consoling himself with the idea that it was the grease hitting his stomach, definitely not a fresh batch of guilt, he put the plate back down and grabbed the remote, turning the volume up to just past comfortably loud. He willed whatever movie about dance Ten had picked out to consume his thoughts but wasn't sure  _ Step Up 2 _ was quite up for the challenge.

 

\---

 

Sometimes time passes in a blur of activity, moments strung together like notes coming together to create a song; sometimes time passes in a vacuum, the emptiness of the hours echoing into a single dull stretch.

 

The next two days were neither of those.

 

Taeil went about his days, running mundane errands, completing paperwork, meeting up with Ten and Dongyoung for karaoke. But the moments were dots that instead of remaining distinct patches of color, smeared into one another, leaving a muddiness that clung to him. Though he tried to drag his feet, time yanked him along, depositing him on the morning of the reaping where it washed its hands of him.

 

He showered, taking his time afterwards to stare at his face in the fogged mirror. He knew he couldn't change his face, but he ran his fingers over it anyway. How was someone supposed to look before they collected someone's soul? Ten looked kind, always approaching people with a soft smile, his hair just barely grazing his sparkling eyes. Dongyoung managed a sort a wide-eyed innocence paired with a determined efficiency about him. Taeil had tried the soft smile, his dry lips stretching over his teeth in an expression that read forced instead of soothing; his attempts at seeming effortlessly competent went about the same.

 

He ran his tongue over his lips and straightened up over the sink. Taeil was just neat. Hair parted in an even line, shirts tucked into his pants. Maybe an orderly, unassuming look didn't leave any sort of impression, but maybe he truly didn't want to leave one. Taeil dressed, finally tugging his gloves over his hands and heading out the door.

 

\---

 

His breath trailed behind him in white clouds as he walked towards the park. Winter sunk its claws into the city with each passing day. He knew his lips would crack even more and regretted not using a balm before he left. Shrugging it off, he reached the location, pulling the card out from his pocket to make sure he was where he needed to be.

 

11:49

 

Taeil stood there, shifting his weight from leg to leg and occasionally bouncing in place in an effort to coax his body into creating just a bit more heat. Looking around, he tried to spot his mark, considering and dismissing dozens of people around him. There were parents watching children climb around the playground while a vendor sold hot coffee. Couples walked together, pressed against each other. People played chess, moving their pieces before shoving their hands back into pockets. A man crouched down over an open box of flyers.

 

A gust of wind decided to pick up at that moment, grabbing the flyers and carrying them across the park. One headed straight towards Taeil's face; catching it, he smoothed it open to see an advertisement for a dueling pianos night at a bar not far from here. He looked up to see the man running with the flyers clutched to his chest, chasing the strays. The wind tossed his hair around and colored his cheeks red. His lips were parted as his breath danced around his face. He stopped in front of Taeil, a smile tugging his cheeks up, dimpling the left side. His eyes shone with exhilaration as he reached for the flyer in Taeil's hand.

 

Taeil blinked up at him, his own breath caught in his throat as his heart tried to decide between pounding furiously and skipping beats. His brain finally starting up again in order to put two and two together.

 

_ Oh. Shit,  _ Taeil thought.

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i had to wait for my ao3 invite so i had a backlog of this fic. i won't be posting every day, but kudos and comments are very encouraging, thank you ;; 
> 
> this chapter is unbeta'd since i tried to look over it myself and had to stop so i didnt end up hating something i like


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